“Why Zombies? Why Now?”

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

There’s no denying the popularity of zombies—by which I mean the modern brain-hungry, shambling, disgusting, undead-or-plague-infected monsters, not the traditional figures from voodoo culture. The modern craze started in the late 1960s and 1970s with George Romero and John A. Russo’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968 and the movie franchises that followed it. But recently the popularity of zombies seems to have grown dramatically. Movies like Zombieland, 28 Days Later, and Shaun of the Dead seem to come out every year; books like Max Brooks’s World War Z and the young adult novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth climb the bestseller lists; and video games like Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead sell millions of copies.
:But what if this fascination is about more than just gross-out gore and action thrills? What if it represents a subtle, subconscious understanding that something is wrong—spiritually wrong—with our culture.

Zombies represent the appetite divorced from everything else. They are incapable of judgment, self-awareness, or self-preservation. Though they still move and act, they are not really alive. They hunger and are never filled. And they aren’t just hungry for anything—they specifically want to eat the living, and even more specifically the brain, seat of rationality and self control.

In Pauline terms, they are the sarx in its purest form. Without a soul to control it, the flesh is a slave to its own desires. The rise in popularity of zombies, then, may reflect a rise in anxiety over the elevation of appetite in modern life, a popular recognition that appetite has gotten out of control, and that unchecked, unreflective, and immoderate appetite is a form of death.

It’s definitely a Thing That Makes You Go Hmmmm…especially for me. Many’s the time I’ve driven through the mean streets of Folsom, where the story is always the same: Dickhead in the car in front of you has all the time in the world, dickhead in the car behind you is in some big ol’ hurry — until he passes you and gets his butt in your face, then all of a sudden he has all the time in the world. What a bunch of dickheads. Move it, dickhead!

And then I stop and think…my God, this is why they behave like this; they’re doing it to each other. They just did it to me, and I’m becoming one of them! It’s like zombies! And I’ve been bitten!

So why now? I think Cordray is on to something. People “work” by sitting in cubicles five feet wide and seven feet deep, and doing something that justifies a status report or a time sheet. That’s their “work.” If they’re exceptionally lucky, they’ll be among the very few who actually build something and then they’ll be able to say, look, I pulled in a paycheck by building something. But most people don’t build something…so they perform something…then they get the paycheck and spend it, or give it to somebody else to go spend. Then they consume, sleep, and it’s time to go do it again and again. Perform and consume. Occasionally some unsettling piece of evidence will arrive to suggest nobody’s placing any real value on the performing, that the remuneration of the paycheck is simply part of someone else’s performance. And so people, quite logically, start to feel like zombies; just drifting through a so-called “life” with an appetite.

Why now? Because we’re bored, that’s why. We are overly-urbanized. The problems we manage to identify in hopes of a constructive solution, we look to others to solve — without faith.

I have also noted this increase in fascination with zombies. I also note that there is a similar increase in fascination with vampires…. I really would like to chart the popularity of these two monsters and compare the timeline to that of which party is in power. My operating hypothesis is that there is some correlation between them and the ascendency of conservatism or liberalism in the halls of power….

Consider that vampires (per current portrayal, since at least Dracula) have a certain appeal to the liberal fantasy mindset. Dark, brooding, eternally youthful, elitists, lords and ladies who rule from dark castles and ominous mansions over the mundane people below them. A liberal fantasy, but a conservative’s fear…. half the horror of the original Dracula was that he was a COUNT— in a time when nobility was withering on the vine in Europe, he lived on eternally in his crumbling castle and preyed upon the peasants below. Conservatives have enough sense to find something averting about elitist bloodsuckers…. while liberals and teenage girls (same mental maturity) swoon over them and cover them in glitter.

Contrariwise, the zombie holocaust has some certain appeal to the conservative mindset— a world where everything is stripped of pretense and down to the nitty gritty. Where self-reliance and common sense aren’t just popular, but vital, the choking layers of federal bureaucratic meddling are null and void, for sure no damn-fool gun grabbers, and stupidity is a self-serving death sentence. Deep down conservatives regard liberals as unprepared for reality.. and there’s a certain schadenfreude in imagining it coming back on them to literally eat their lunch. (Remember your last zombie movie? Remember when the stupid or annoying useless character got eaten? Did you applaud? I applauded.)

But liberals… who else harbors such an atavistic fear and loathing of the “mindless masses” like a leftist? If you run down the list, pretty much every liberal boogeyman (overpopulation, consumer culture, the Tea Party, anthropogenic global warming) is rooted in a resentment and loathing of the teeming masses of the great unwashed. The vision of mindless shuffling hordes— FAR less intelligent than themselves— coming to get them is probably embedded permanently in the back of their minds.

I dunno, I have to say I see werewolves as more of a peripheral…. a consequence of people in entertainment going “ooh, we’re doing vampires, nobody’s doing werewolves, let’s do werewolves too!” I’ve seen a couple of werewolf flicks (the excellent “Wolfman” remake, for one) but they’re more notable for their rarity than their pervasiveness. Modern man, whether hippy treehugger, urban/suburban dweller or rural farmhand, is unlikely to hold that ancient visceral fear of the wild that made lycanthropes such an archetype for fear of the wild for man at one time…. if anything, people who watch a werewolf flick are more likely to be noting how UNlike a werewolf’s behavior is to that of a real wolf (Dangerous predators they may be, but real wolves don’t tend to randomly slaughter anything within reach, nor do they tend to beeline straight for the nearest patch of humans.)

Gee, I always thought of the werewolf genre as a special phobia of its own, tapping into the same wellspring of primal fear as The Enemy Within. In fact, this is the fear the word oikophobia attempts to describe, isn’t it?

There is something really freaky and creepy about actually being the monster; waking up in the middle of the night after a complete black-out, with no idea at all where you’ve been, and blood on your clothes.